The Dead Don't Hurt

In its unconventional narrative structure and its tender perspective on a brutal era, Mortensen’s film acts as a mirror of his own public persona: tightly drawn, deeply felt, refreshingly unconventional.

Mortensen’s script tussles between feminist revision and old-school male showdowns, imagining Vivienne as a Joan of Arc-inspired frontierswoman yet subject to the degradations of the era.

What really carried this movie through... it that it ends up spending most of its time on Vicky Krieps, and it becomes like a western romance.

Viggo Mortensen is the new Robert De Niro... And he takes his filmmaking very seriously.

Mortensen does not aggressively impose his vision on us, nor does he do so with the typical shoot-outs of the genre, which appear in a justified and even responsible manner. [Full review in Spanish]

The languid pacing and fractured, nonlinear structure chime with Mortensen’s arthouse sensibilities, rather than the more traditional view of what a frontier adventure should look like.

It’s refreshing to watch a movie in 2024 that use the western genre without subverting it, inverting it, or reinventing it.

The Dead Don't Hurt is a clear labour of love and a throwback to an earlier era of Western, for better and worse.

The whole cast is outstanding, but Krieps ... stands out with her nuanced performance as a strong woman trying to hold her own in an unmerciful world dominated by men. Despite this setting, though, Mortensen is able ... to find beauty amid the violence.


Mortensen... clearly has an adoration for the traditional aesthetic of the Western genre (then again, it should have been immediately obvious from the fact that there is literally a main character called Weston in the script).